S-STEP – Smart technologies for lifecycle performance

Industrial services represent today 50%, or beyond, of the industrial business volumes, and the share is steadily growing. The share of industrial services represents roughly 2/3 of the overall Finnish service exports. The importance of service business in the future is evident as the service business enables revenue flow also after the traditional product sales and, more importantly, the service business is typically many times more profitable than the product sales itself.

The leading industrial services and the related business models are heavily dependent on reliable, accurate, online information and advance prediction capabilities on machine and system level. In the future, the importance of this information will increase and this will require also radical improvements in machine level intelligence and independency. While the ICT for heavy industry has been a trend already for decades, the future business models will require a revolution also in this area. This revolution is currently known as the emerging industrial internet.

The S-STEP program of DIMECC is positioned in the cross roads of these two significant megatrends: 1) the growing importance of industrial service business, and 2) the remarkable emergence of industrial internet or cyber-physical systems. The combination of these trends holds significant advantages for Finnish industries and export. However, before these opportunities can be realized, the problems related to the combination of these opportunities, related technology issues and
scientific problems needs to be solved. This is the core of the S-STEP -program and it has a clear mission: S-STEP creates the industrial internet technology that enables superior services for the Finnish industry.

The S-STEP program consists of four projects which tackles the research questions from various angles. To ensure both the leading scientific knowledge creation and the respective industrial relevance, the program is orchestrated through technology toolbox oriented work which focuses on creation of the new leading knowledge capital and related tools, and thru industrial showcase work, which covers the experimental part of the capability creation based on real industrial cases. This way we ensure that the created toolboxes and knowledge can be effectively integrated into various industrial problems increasing the impact of the results, whereas, the versatile showcases enable rich experimental data for the toolbox research.

The total volume of the program is 25,6M€ and its intended duration is 4 years, starting at June 1, 2014. There are 21 industrial partners and 9 research or academic partners.

S-STEP program structure. The scientific core of the program is created in so-called toolbox portions of the projects (illustrated as inside the S-STEP triangle), whereas, the so-called industrial showcase portions of the projects demonstrate the benefits of the technologies (outside of the triangle).